Miracles of Mediation and Mobility in the Early Modern Spanish World

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, miracle narratives played powerful and increasingly mobile roles across the Spanish world. Purposeful in the extreme, and often driven by writerly activators and promoters in search of different kinds of legitimacy, miracles stories were cultural materials that moved and morphed – between languages, between societies, between the shared understandings of entire ages. The miraculous was a crucible through which Catholic Christianity authority and lived reality were expressed, challenged, appropriated and re-moulded. Moving on from an initial demonstration of the pervasive nature of miracle stories in the early modern Spanish imaginary, I aim to show how the honed structures, complement of motifs and incorporative capacity of this sacred narrative tradition worked in tandem with the conditions of extreme mobility, and the wandering, particularising impetus which followed the evangelisations and attempted consolidations of Spanish Christian rule in a succession of “new worlds.” Selecting a few examples from a trans-oceanic miraculous corpus, I find the miraculous imaginary within an ever-widening, multi-ethnic world to be, simultaneously, a restless realm of religious and cultural anxieties about error and impurity, and an emerging commonsense.